Antispam strike under way

The Net is waiting to feel the effects as antispammers who cancel newsgroup spam go on strike and the spam floodgates reopen.

4 April 19982:25 am BST

One by one about 30 antispammers went on "strike" today,
halting the unpaid labor they have been performing for months: stopping spam from reaching Usenet newsgroups.

Now they will wait to see what happens to Usenet, the public bulletin
board system of the Internet.

The loose coalition of people who daily spend hours issuing orders that
prevent newsgroup spam--duplicate letters sent to many newsgroups at the
same time--from reaching its destination called for the "moratorium" to begin
today.

The idea is to hold Internet access providers and others accountable for
cleaning up spam, both by preventing it from ever being sent and by
filtering it on their own servers.

Most major ISPs, especially those that have been targeted by the group to
force the issue, already do so, said Chris Lewis, one of the strike
organizers.

But many small and medium-sized ISPs have never had to face the reality of
how spam would cripple their systems if the antispammers weren't sending
cancel messages, Lewis said.

"Tomorrow, you'll start seeing the results," he said today. "There will
have been some ISPs who were relying on us to control spam who will roll
over and explode. Major ISPs and places like DejaNews [which archives Usenet postings] will
be fine. Their filtering will be killing most of it. What we're really
interested in dealing with is the small and medium ISPs that haven't had
problems before."

Ideally, the strike will force ISPs to see the problem and start taking measures to prevent it, Lewis said.

The concept behind the strike is almost the mirror opposite of the
so-called Usenet Death Penalties that the group has imposed on major
ISPs such as CompuServe, Netcom, and UUNet.

In a Usenet Death Penalty (UDP), ISPs that consistently generate Usenet spam
are targeted. The antispammers cancel all messages coming from the ISPs to
punish them for creating so much spam and to rid the Net of it at the same
time. In every case, after an ISP has been targeted, it has changed its
spam policies.

But spam continues to be generated elsewhere.

That's why Allen and the others have walked off their jobs--and intend to
stay off for a few weeks.

"We really do not like doing this, but it's something we believe in our
hearts that we have to do," Allen said. "This is an experiment. What we've
been doing up till now is not progressing. It's time to do something
[bigger]...seeing what will resolve it once and for all."